


Sleeping Beauty

by cosmogyrals



Category: Ashes to Ashes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyrals/pseuds/cosmogyrals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post-S2 oneshot AU. Gene spends time with Alex while she's in hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Beauty

Alex's blood is still on his hands the first time he comes to visit her in hospital. Though it's not really a visit - he might've followed the ambulance. And might've broken a few dozen laws of the motorways while doing so, but that's hardly anything new for Gene. He's been pacing the halls like an expectant father, chain-smoking fags till the butts are nearly burnt down to his fingers. A nurse comes to ask him if he's next of kin, and he says no - she doesn't _have_ any family, or doesn't talk about them if she does, except for her daughter. Maybe she's estranged, maybe they're all dead; it's not anything he's ever bothered to ask her about.

They let him in to see her, though there's a pair of plods watching - as if they expect him to attack her. All right, so technically, he _did_ shoot her, but he didn't mean to. Which he's pretty sure won't go over spectacularly in the entire messy internal investigation that he's going to be part of - a bloody great three-ring circus, and right now, sitting here in a hospital room that smells of stale bleach and a trace of cigarette smoke and waiting for Alex to wake up sounds infinitely preferable to going back to CID.

"Bolly," he urges her when the PCs leave for a smoke. "Bolly, you've got t' wake up, d'you 'ear me? They think I've shot you - well, I did _shoot_ you, but I didn't..." Gene sighs, running his hands through his hair for a moment. "Bolly!" he calls over and over again, and he wants to just _shake_ her till her eyes open 'cos he's worried sick, not just about his job, but about Alex and Chris and Shaz and the whole bloody lot of them, and it all seems to hinge on Alex goddamned Drake.

A doctor pulls him aside when he's ready to leave and tells him that she's in a coma - he doesn't know when or if she'll regain consciousness. He doesn't know how long they can wait, and, with no next of kin, how long they should wait. Funding's tight, and the demand for life support equipment is even higher. Gene listens to this in a bit of a daze; he's not used to any of this, and he still believes that Alex is going to wake up any minute, that she's just playing silly buggers with him.

"All right," he tells her the next time he comes to visit. "You win, you miserable harpy. You were right, I was wrong, now wake the hell up, 'cos this isn't funny anymore." But there's no sign of movement other than the rise and fall of her chest, no sounds but the mechanical beeps and whirs of the equipment that surrounds her with a tangle of wires. "C'mon," he pleads, and Gene Hunt _never_ stoops to begging; if she does wake up now, she'll never let him hear the end of it. She'll gloat with her smug superiority and he'll bitch at her for being a pain in the arse, but at least things will be _normal_ again.

But a few days later, he's there again; she's still asleep (he likes that better than 'coma' or 'vegetative state', like she's turned into a bloody turnip or something) and he's still on indefinite suspension. Gene notices that the flowers from the assorted members of CID are starting to look a little manky, and that's putting it politely. He chucks the lot of them into the bin; fat lot of cheering up they did. (He hadn't sent flowers; Gene's never been a flower sort of bloke, not even on occasions when he could've given them without risking the loss of his masculinity.) "At least there aren't any roses, eh?" he cracks, but the joke falls flat in the silence.

Visiting Alex gives him something to do with his time - he's never spent time in his flat, and he doesn't intend to do so now. So he spends some of his time in between the interminable interrogation sessions with her. It's more time than he's ever spent with a bird in his life, clothed or no, and that includes his ex-wife. He flounders at first - he doesn't know what to do, doesn't know why he keeps coming back. But then he starts _talking_ to her. (And wouldn't she love that, practically being a bloody psychiatrist in her sleep.)

At first he sticks to talking about being a copper - stories from when he first joined the force, criminals he's put behind bars, that sort of thing. And then he starts talking about Sam, how he was a complete nutter, but they would've got along, really, two of a kind, and it still _hurts_ to talk about him, more than he'd ever admit to anybody, but the more he tells her, the easier it gets. (He'll have to introduce her to Annie one day - it wouldn't hurt the girl to come down to London for a change, would it?)

Then he opens up, starts talking about when he was a kid, trying to take care of his mum, keep his brother out of trouble, scrounging together whatever he could for them. He'd never stooped to trying to steal his dad's pay packet before he drank it all away, but he'd thought about it; life was rough, but Gene had always had his morals. Time was, that was the only thing he'd had. He tells Alex about his ex-wife and _that_ whole mess, how stupid teenagers are when they fall in love (or twenty-something constables, in his case), and, since she's got a daughter and no husband, he's pretty sure she'd agree with him on that account. He tells her about his brother, a strung-out junkie found dead in a gutter, overdosed on heroin, needle still in his arm, and his dad, practically yellow as a daffodil before his liver gave out. (If she ever lets a word of this slip, he tells Alex, he'll throttle her with his bare hands.)

The next time he comes, a rabbity-looking doctor tells him that they can't keep waiting on her, not with people with treatable diseases and families waiting. He says he'd waited to do it till Gene could be there, that he'd noticed his visits, and maybe he wasn't next of kin, but he had just as much a right to be there as anybody else. He removes the wires and tubes deftly, a nurse helping him without saying a word, and suddenly Alex looks so much smaller in the bed all by herself. They leave, and Gene takes one of her hands, feeling her pulse in her wrist under his calloused fingertips. Her skin is paper-white, and he can see the delicate blue veins under the surface - she feels colder than she ever has before.

He has the sudden absurd thought that maybe he's in a damn fairy tale, that he's meant to be Prince Charming and kiss her on the lips and wake her up and they can all live happily ever after with birds chirping and woodland animals singing a merry little song - but he knows that's not how life works. Instead, he watches her breathe in and out, in and out, in and out, and then...nothing. He squeezes her hand one last time, then folds both her hands on her chest and pulls the sheet up over her head before he leaves.


End file.
